sucka sc: knit & crochet

In which fate conspires to make me a hypocrite

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

After all that “I hate pictures of sheep” talk, and all that “sheep are stupid and messy and I hate that all knitters are supposed to love them” acrimony, I volunteered to illustrate something for the Stitch ‘n’ Seek game at Stitches West.

All I will say is that is has a sheep wearing a deerstalker, Sherlock Holmes-style. There is also a ball of yarn with a bushy mustache. And they are so freaking cute. I’ll post them here if and after the final versions get the thumbs-up.

I guess I have to amend my rule to say “All sheep and yarn drawings other than mine and Franklin’s are stupid.” I’m not trying to equate my awkward Illustrator hack work with Mr. Habit’s graceful little sketches — it’s just that everybody else steals their pictures of sheep from Google Images searches, so as far as I know, it’s just the two of us posting our own drawings.

[Edited to add: Oh, the hell with waiting. Here they are: I'm playing and I'm a clue.]

KNIT LIFE

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

Normal’s beer cozy. Note the fetching fringed scarf.

Some friends and I started a stitch ‘n’ bitch in Oakland! It’s a bit of a drive for me, since I live in the South Bay, but it’s a great way to hang out with my East Bay and SF friends. The first meeting was Wednesday and, of course, I completely forgot a camera. But I did get two-thirds of the way through a hat for M and Jovino’s Nabaztag, a WiFi-enabled gadget shaped like a rabbit that is the cutest damn thing you’ve ever seen. And, even better, my friend Normal made a beer cozy!

And there were kittens! They batted at JetKat’s dreads, tried to kill yarn and bolted around the floor until they finally crashed out in a tiny little heap.

As we’re all Internet freaks, today I made a “Knittas in da hood” tribe on Tribe.net, which is kind of like MySpace for freaks. When I saw I could upload a photo for the tribe, I decided that instead of stealing some random emblem or photo from a Google Images search, I’d make something cool, because that is the kind of genius designer person I am.

Now observe, and be jealous:

This is how we roll at my stitch ‘n’ bitch.

Grandmothers

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

From Rosie, via The Knitting Curmudgeon, on the “easy knitting” or “This isn’t your grandmother’s knitting” marketing strategy:

Hey, publishers–stop insulting my grandmother. I know that’s not what you’re trying to do, but I’ve had it. Eve Plotnick and Dorothy Myers were women of skill, patience, resourcefulness, and creativity. And if you think I’ll ever think better of anything you’re showing me because you tell me it’s unlike what they did or would do, you’re way wrong.

My grandmother knit and quilted and crocheted. She made plenty of kitschy things that still make me cringe, but she also kept a whole brood of kids warm and comfortable in rural Maine, where winter kills people who aren’t well prepared. Sure, I don’t want to dress like her and her color choices make me squint with disapproval, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want her skills, her industriousness and her creativity that made everything that passed through her hands into some kind of art.

Totoros and long tails

Tuesday, December 12th, 2006

Dammit, someone beat me to making an amigurumi Totoro! Good thing, too, because it looks way better than what I could invent with my rudimentary crochet design skills right now. At least there’s a pattern!

Are you ready for this level of cute? I think not.

Obsessive much?

So, I’ve figured out how to knit brioche stitch flat on single-pointed needles, instead of knitting across each row with first one color and then the other with double-points or a circular. It requires being able to knit two-handed. Is this the kind of thing the Internet would care about, or are there so few people who can knit two-handed and want to shave ten seconds off each row of a scarf that I shouldn’t bother?

I guess the Long Tail theory — basically, the idea that the demand for less-popular ideas or products adds up to a significant part of one’s customer base — will eventually inspire me to do a tutorial on it. There are a million articles about casting on, but so far I haven’t found any about making brioche stitch less fiddly, and that kind of over-specific, trivia-bordering-on-mania content is exactly what I love about the Internet.